Seagate ships a billion hard drives

Seagate is basking in their own glory this week as they announced the shipment of its one billionth hard drive. A press release announcing this is surely nicer than a road sign saying “One Billion Served”, and acts as a reminder of how far the HDD industry has come. Seagate's first mass storage unit sold was the ST506, in 1979, which had a capacity of 5 megabytes and cost just as much as an entire desktop system with monitor would cost you today. Now, for a tenth of the price you can get a disk that carries 100,000 times the data.

For a company so happy to play up how well they've done in the hard drive market, Seagate made some less friendly news last week when they sued STEC over the manufacture of solid state disks.